As a web publisher one of my goals is maximizing Adsense clickthrough rates. In the short term this means big profits – but what does it mean long-term?

When a visitor lands on your website for the very first time and immediately clicks on an Adsense ad, what are the chances that they will return to your site?

I don’t have any hard stats on this. It might be time to find out.

I’ve made it a point to get customers to return to my websites. There are several techniques I’ve used. These involve different things like “Bookmark” buttons and opt-in newsletters – along with regular updates.

SE spammers who run scraper sites have no interest in their website’s longevity. What matters is right now.

I’m not a SE spammer and you probably aren’t either. That means longevity should be in our minds as we develop our websites.

Think about this (horrible) analogy:

Each person who lands on your website from a search engine is like a golden goose. You can sell that goose for $100 and start looking for another one or you can keep that goose and make 50 cents from it today… but it will keep making more money for years to come. If you take care of it, those revenues will grow expontentially.

There is a big opportunity cost for you. Not only will you sacrifice your short-term revenue but you will also have to invest a lot more time, money, and effort into building a top-notch site that people will want to return to and tell there friends about.

You might not have the resources to do this to every single website that your own. Instead, try this out with your most successful site – the long term payoff could be huge.

Check out Chris Beasley’s new blog on Sitepoint, Website Revenue Strategies. Chris is known as aspen on the Sitepoint forums and also is the owner of WebsitePublisher.net.

Here is a great quote from his first post that shows where he’s coming from:

The sites you make today (and yes, you should start as soon as possible if you want to do this) will be established in 5 years. If you really made website publishing your job and worked on it on a daily basis I honestly think it’d be nearly impossible for you to not be making a decent income from it in 5 years. You’d have to make some pretty big mistakes to fail in the long run.

MTV bought iFilm for $49 million. Emap purchased subscription fashion site Worth Global Style Network $245 Million.

Has the dot com boom finally returned?

Jupitermedia has been aquiring stock photograph sites like a monster this past year. As reported on PaidContent.org, they have just purchased another, Bananastock.co.uk for $19 million.

Check out this Adsense case study at Google of Weblogs Inc. (the company that was purchased by AOL for $25 million last week.)

After implementing AdSense, Weblogs blogs were earning only a couple hundred dollars a day from the program. “At first we didn’t really understand how to use it,” Calacanis says, noting that “we thought of it as helping to pay some bills.” But when over about six months’ time AdSense revenues reached more than $1,000 a day, he says he realized that there was a significant opportunity in AdSense – if his team would invest the time in making it work even better.

Seeing people complain about getting banned from Google on webmaster forums seems to be a common occurance. The usual story is “I got banned, they say there were fraudulant clicks, but I didn’t click any of my ads.”

Often this is a new Adsense user with one site who hasn’t recieved their first check yet. I suspect most of them are guilty as charged.

I’m hearing more and more now that Google issues warnings before bans. Often webmasters running many large websites accidentally miss things.

There is a thread on Sitepoint by a guy who apparently runs a community site or forum. Someone uploading some adult images and Google banned his account. I don’t know all of the details, but 6 days later (today) the guy said that after contacting Google he straightened things out and was back in the program.

I’m not encouraging you to not pay attention to the TOS. What I am saying is that if you read it & clearly understand it & do your best to follow it you should’t have anything to worry about.

Its also worth noting you should access your Adsense stats from one internet connection that other people aren’t using. Showing your little brother your websites on your computer and then leaving the room is probably a bad idea.

Google may send you your paycheck every month, but remember you are funding some employee’s meals prepared by Google’s gourmet chefs. (just kidding; the point is your site makes them money too.)

From paidcontent.org:

As explained on the official Google blog by Sheryl Sandberg, VP-global online sales & operations, the one percent of equity comes from 3 million shares of stock that will be donated and invested over 20 years; the one percent of profit will go to Google.org each year and also will be invested.

Its good to know that Google is putting emphasis on helping entrepreneurs in third world countries. Many charity organizations just dump money and food at problems rather than thinking about long-term solutions.

For more information check out Google.org.

This past weekend I finished reading How To Salvage Millions From Your Small Business.

At first glance this book seems pretty light. Thumb through the book and you will noticed the pages have wide margins and only about 4 to 5 paragraphs on each page.

Don’t think that its lack of bulk equals lack of value – I found it to be quite the opposite.

Its clear to me that extreme success isn’t the result of plain old luck. There is a day and night difference between mediocre business owners and the ones that go on to make millions.

The authors make the point that you absolutely must be passionate about your work in order stand out from the rest. Most of the site owners I know fall into this category. Many would continue even if there was no money involved. If you fall into this category – read this book. It will help you re-focus and organize yourself. Making more money is just a side-effect.

There were a few things I didn’t agree with the writers on. In one chapter they recommenend only making phone calls from a cell phone and only in your “spare” time – driving and going to the bathroom (yes, thats exactly what they said.)

To find out more about this book check out their website: http://www.salvagingmillions.com/salmillions/default.htm

This weekend I had the oppurtunity to interview Gene from Webmasterlabor. You may know him as $5 Submissiions on various webmaster boards around the internet. Gene runs an outsourcing company which specializes in writing, manual data entry, and promotions.

1. When did you first get the idea for Webmaster Labor?

I first had the idea behind Webmaster Labor in the summer of 2000. I was working for a Bay Area-based Venture Capital/Incubator company and we kept running into the same problem–high website content and research costs. We would hire recent US college grads for $30K each so our total content cost was, to say the least, oppressive. I was born in the Philippines and spent my grade school years there so I am quite familiar with its English proficiency and general educational attainment level. The idea arose in 2000 of matching the English text content and data input needs of American companies with low cost but high quality Filipino labor. Unfortunately, the firm I worked for folded before I was able to implement my idea. It would have saved them quite a huge amount of resources and may have forestalled/prevented their closure.

2. What is your business background before you started Webmaster Labor?

I have always been active in online communications. I was an electronic Bulletin Board Systems Operator (”sysop”) for a 2 line forum back in 1993. Before that, I was a forum/community site moderator for one of the largest BBS systems in Southern California. Early on, I saw the potential of electronic communications regarding commerce and community building.

3. I recall that Webmaster Labor used to be primarily geared toward people in the adult industry, why the change of focus to mainstream?

Mainstream is much larger than adult. Moreover, mainstream work is more in line with the culture and expectations of local Filipino culture. I feel mthat my staff has a wider creative and productive latitude than with adult. Finally, there are certain pending bills in the Philippine legislature that may dramatically impact adult outsourcing as it is currently performed in this country. We decided to get ahead of the changes instead of being forced into a reactive position.

4. Can your employees write search engine optimized content? I didn’t see any reference to this on Webmaster Labor’s site.

We focus primarily on writing text content which our clients then optimize and port into their SE optimized pages. Our clients supply the keywords we should focus on along with any editorial ’style’ or ‘approach’ we should use. We also ask for keyword densities. Our writers only cost $450 a month. That is less than $3 per hour since we devote 160 hours per week to each client.

5. What do you do to ensure that your employees can’t use other people’s copyrighted work and claim it is their own?

We compare their text to search engine sources as well as any research primary sources. This eliminates the twin problems of copyright issues as well as search engine duplicate content penalties. We employ strict guidelines and quality checks to prevent this issue.

6. Do you run other websites or businesses besides Webmaster Labor, if yes, any details?

I am a partner in an academic assistance service website. This service assists students with “low to middle” GPAs get a shot at admission into some top US colleges, law schools, medical schools, and MBA programs. I also run a funny video mainstream site similar to ebaumsworld and an ethnic-specific online book site. We also have a free dating site in the works.

7. What do you think about the purchase of Weblogs Inc. by AOL for $25 million?

I find this purchase particularly interesting since we do “micro-blogging” for both clients and inhouse initiatives. Basically, we set up tons of differing blogs each focusing on a particular topic and subtopic. We then assign our writers to write original materials for the blogs, link it to other blogs, develop cross blog relationships, and syndicate royalty-free content into our blogs. At $450 per month, we can cost effectively perform the blog ‘population’ required for a Weblogs type of system.

8. Where would you like to be in 15 years?

We are slowly evolving towards a vertically integrated media company. Eventually though, I’d like to start a free school here in the Philippines to help kids from poor families help themselves through an English-focused education which they can use to gain employment at outsourcing companies. My mother came from such a background and I’d like to return the favor by setting up an institution that helps individuals who have the drive but not the means to help themselves through education.

I was just using Last.fm tonight and noticed what appears to be a new Adsense ad unit (screenshot above.) Besides looking completely different, there was a underline style mouseover.

This is very interesting. Its clear to me that as people start to place “Adsense” into the catagory of advertising they kind of filter it out and don’t read the ads. I’d be interested in seeing what effect mouseover link has on clickthrough rates (besides the new style,)

(update: Jen from Jensense Contextual Advertising Blog says this is a “custom ad unit that premiums and select regulars get”)